In my survey, 72% of participants agreed that Governments should provide the tools to make it easier for citizens to view datasets, and 58% agreed that they are not very good at building online services. In addition, 47% said that governments should improve the quality of available data while 42% of participants need to scrape government websites to collect data because it is not available in an open format.
Should governments get out of the business of developing interfaces and stick to publishing raw data only?
Governments should focus their resources on:
1. providing open API’s so applications can interface with their data.
2. keeping data sets up-to-date, accurate, and thoroughly annotated with metadata.
3. providing communication channels so that data consumers (citizens, civil society, enterprise) can reach domain experts for each data set. For example, a question & answer web site (like stackexchange.com) where civil servants can monitor questions on particular topics and direct them to the right people.